The character of the story

The character we meet in the story under analysis is Jacob Blivens. He is the protagonist of the story. The writer reveals J.Blivens by means of indirect characterization of the character. He is a good, clever and an obedient boy: 'He always obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their demands were; and he always learned his book, and never was late at Sabbath- school’. He never lies and no matter how convenient it was. Jacob is a kind child, who never robs birds’ nests and never gives hot pennies to organ-grinders’ monkey. This boy is keen on reading all the Sunday-school books, where he finds the greatest delight. He believes in the gold little boys in the books. Without a doubt, Jacob has  dreams – to meet with them, even to travel thousand of miles and gaze on them, and the second dream is to be put in a Sunday school book, because he is a very good boy, doings so many good things. Unfortunately, his dreams will never come true. ‘It made him feel a lithe uncomfortable sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died. He loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about being a Sunday-school-boo boy. He knew it was not healthy to be good’.

    Jacob Blivens wants to teach other bad boys to do only good and right affairs, but when he stars to do it, he has troubles:  once the boy who falls out of a neighbor’s apple tree breaks Jacob’s arm; once he wants to help a blind man, but the man doesn’t give him any blessing at all, ‘but whacked him over the head with his stick and said he would like to catch him shoving him again, and then pretending to help him up’. He does everything as in the books but it has the opposite.

    The reason that Jacob is so “good” is because he likes to read the Sunday-school books, and is fascinated by the good little boys portrayed in the books, he believes they existed and he idealizes them thinking he will meet one of them. And see what happen to them in the end, however, every time he looks at the end he sees that all of them died and the picture of the funeral with everybody else weeping. Consequently, he never met any of those boys.